Electronic payment transactions are known in the art. Such electronic payment transactions typically involve transfers of funds or sales transactions. Electronic fund transfers occur between financial institutions, and may be implemented by the financial institutions or by individual users, such as checking account holders that use electronic bill payment software. Sales transactions may be implemented by a variety of merchants. For example, mail-order merchants may receive orders via telephone or the Internet, including credit card data. Point-of-sale merchants may accumulate credit card data and transfer the accumulated credit card data to a credit card payment processor for handling. Many other electronic payment transactions are also known. For example, some of these electronic payment transactions have been standardized according to the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standard, which is used by businesses to format electronic data files for financial transactions as well as other transactions.
Electronic payment transactions simplify the processing of electronic payments, but may result in merchant handling errors or card user abuse, such as fraud. For such errors or abuse, it is necessary to have a system for processing transactions that have been questioned by the card user. Such systems typically require an operator to interface with the user. An operator may not be able to effectively analyze such problems, which typically require a significant amount of time to resolve and may still not be resolved adequately after operator handling.
For example, if a credit card account holder challenges a sales transaction, it may be necessary to obtain a copy of the original sales draft or charge authorization for the transaction, through what is known as a retrieval request. This sales draft is typically kept by the merchant for 18 months after the transaction, and it is therefore necessary to relay the retrieval request from the credit card user to the issuing bank of the credit card, then to a credit card organization such as Visa™ or MasterCard™, then to a payment processor for merchants, and finally to the merchant. In many cases, the merchant may be unable to provide the sales draft when requested by the card-issuing financial institution. Thus, protocols for dealing with retrieval requests may cause either the credit card account holder or the merchant to suffer a loss even when it may be possible to reconcile the challenged charge.